We Are So Grateful For You
Friends,
We can’t thank you enough for using MEF films. For 25 years now, we’ve been producing and distributing educational films that challenge students to think critically about how mainstream media narratives shape our ideas and attitudes about ourselves, each other, and the world. And thanks to educators and activists like you, we’re having a real impact.
Over the past year, with your support, a number of our films have been helping to shape the national conversation around a range of absolutely crucial issues.
More Than a Word, directed by John and Kenn Little of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, has been shining much-needed light on the accelerating national debate surrounding Native American sports mascots. Since its release this past summer, the film has screened in more than 100 communities around the country, helping to inspire a long-overdue reckoning with Native American history and racial stereotyping at a time when the rights of indigenous peoples are under renewed attack.
The Occupation of the American Mind, which looks at US news media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has also been making waves. In the past year alone, as the question of Palestinian human rights has moved into the mainstream, the film has screened in hundreds of communities around the country. Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! dedicated an entire show to the film, interviewing narrator Roger Waters and MEF Executive Director Sut Jhally live in studio. And international audiences have responded to the film as well, with Sut traveling to high-profile screenings in Mexico City, London, Beirut, and beyond.
In addition, we’re grateful for the amazing response we’ve been getting to our new film The Great White Hoax: Donald Trump & the Politics of Race and Class in America, featuring acclaimed anti-racist educator and activist Tim Wise. The film, which shows how right-wing politicians have been using racial scapegoats for decades to divide and conquer the white working class vote, has been earning high praise from educators, scholars, and political commentators around the country, including CNN’s Van Jones. Jones called The Great White Hoax “timely and necessary,” adding that it “demonstrates that Trumpism is nothing new, that racial scapegoating is one of the oldest games in American politics, and that we must defeat the narrative of fear and division in order to move our country forward.”
We’re also thrilled about our newest release, Advertising at the Edge of the Apocalypse, which examines the devastating cultural and environmental fallout from hyper-commercialism, mass consumerism, and the commodification of human desire. For years, our customers and friends have been asking us to update MEF Executive Director Sut Jhally’s acclaimed 1997 film Advertising & the End of the World. This year we finally did. Don’t miss Sut’s powerful and timely look at how the advertising industry spends billions of dollars a year to make sure we keep on consuming even as the health of the planet hangs in the balance.
Finally, we’re thankful that educators and activists have been turning to MEF films like Tough Guise 2, The Line, Flirting with Danger, and War Zone to help make sense of the epidemic levels of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and other forms of gender violence that are now coming to light thanks to the #MeToo movement.
With all of this in mind, and as the New Year approaches, we just wanted to say thanks for screening MEF films in your classes and communities and helping us shine a light on important issues that mainstream media outlets too often fail to address.
It’s your continuing commitment to media education that makes our work possible.
In solidarity, and with deep gratitude,
The MEF team
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